Wups
I just realized that Neal Stephenson and William Gibson have always been the same author in my head. I have now read or am reading books by both, and never realized I was reading from two different authors. Ha. I’m 35% through Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), which is no easier to read after several hundred pages but is finding its way toward being a bit of a page turner, in a slow-bleed marathon kind of way.
I am realizing that one of the least fancy but most deeply important professional attributes is actually reliability. I think that, in times where I feel my localized reputation has exceeded the value of my work to date, I can often attribute this to being reliable. Even in fairly deterministic analytic work, enough relies on trust that reliability really factors in.